The novel received positive notices upon its release.[6][7] Prior to the Neapolitan Novels, The Days of Abandonment was Ferrante's most popular book in English.[8] Critic Radhika Joneslena has praised the book, saying: "In novelist Elena Ferrante's hands, being abandoned is not a passive condition. On the contrary, it ushers the heroine of The Days of Abandonment into the most intensely lived weeks of her existence. Left with two children and with little explanation by her husband, Mario, Olga juggles anger, denial, capitulation, and desperation as she seeks to understand her predicament through an exploration of her past-not only her marriage, but the specter of an abandoned woman who haunted her childhood."[9]
According to Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times: "Both the novel's emotional and carnal candor are potent. Once Olga begins seeing herself as, in Simone de Beauvoir's words, a woman destroyed, she begins a downward spiral that includes hallucination, terror of poison and grim sexual self-abasement with her aging neighbor."[10]
The book was voted by The Guardian as one of the "Top 10 books about cheating".[11]
The novel was also often compared in the press with Domenico Starnone's Ties, published in 2017. The two novels deal with unravelling marriages from different perspectives, and Starnone was often especulated to have been the person or one of the people behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante, which he has denied. According to The New Yorker: "Starnone coyly pointed out that both “Ties” and “Days of Abandonment” contain the precise detail of a glass vessel, which each wife breaks in response to her husband’s faithlessness. This is but one of many conspicuous correspondences and mirror images between the two novels."[12]
